How to Set the WordPress Twenty-Eleven Theme Showcase Slider to Auto-Advance

Using the fantastic and flexible Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme and its showcase template front page and slider? Wish the showcase slider would slide automatically? I’ve found the answer. The Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme features a pseudo-static front page template called “showcase.” When set as the “home” page template with the blog as “blog,” you have the option […]

WordPress 2.5 New Automatic Plugin Upgrade Problems

I just published WordPress 2.5 Plugins Beware: Automatic Plugin Upgrade Problems on the Blog Herald and recommend that you check it out before using the new Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature in the just released Release Candidate 1 for WordPress 2.5 for beta-testers only. The issue with the new Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature is explained by […]

SEO Sitemaps Now Autodiscoverable: Easy and Automatic Roadmaps to Your Blog Content

In case you missed the news, Google’s Webmaster Central announced that in accordance with the new Sitemap.org, you do not have to submit your XML sitemap to Google or other search engines any more. Instead, you can make your sitemap “autodiscoverable” by directing the visiting web crawler to the location of the sitemap. A sitemap […]

Bloggers Make a Difference – Taking On The Auto Industry

Think blogging doesn’t make a difference? Sea Coast Online reports “Bloggers Take on the Auto Industry”>Sea Coast Online reports “Bloggers Take on the Auto Industry and are having an impact. As Detroit’s automakers struggle to keep market share and make money, a new breed of watchdogs is emerging, thanks to the Internet. They post regular […]

Automattic, and WordPress, Get a New CEO: Toni Schneider

Om Malik reports that a Yahoo Executive Quits Yahoo to work for Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic as CEO. Automattic is the parent company for WordPress, WordPress.com, Akismet, and more. The new CEO is Toni Schneider. Now I can tell you, before everyone else that Toni Schneider, a senior executive spear-heading Yahoo’s Developer Network is leaving the […]

Blog Exercises: Excerpts and Continue Reading

Encountered the front page of a blog where the posts ran on and on and on and on, stretching across the length of the page? Do you ever wish you had more control over the length of your posts on the front page of your site? This Blog Exercise explores the use of the “more” […]

Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]

Blog Exercises: Writing Poetry and Recipes in Your Blog

Do you publish poetry on your site? Feature many quotes? Share recipes? Addresses? If so, you may need to learn how to publish content with single lines instead of double. In WordPress and other publishing platforms with a WYSIWYMG interface, hit the Enter (Return) key and a wide or double space will appear. Each line […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Trackback

In the first blog exercise on trackbacks I explained how trackbacks work and how to respond to trackbacks. It’s time to revisit the concept of how to respond to a trackback. In the exercise, I described the unique quality of trackbacks for tracking conversations across the web. You publish something, someone likes it and publishes […]

WordPress Anniversary: WordPress and Evil

As I look back on the ten years of WordPress, there is a dark side to blogging. While many blamed WordPress for the evil, like guns, WordPress doesn’t cause evil, people cause evil. In fact, WordPress, Automattic, and the WordPress Community has fought longer and harder against the evil doers in the world than most […]

Blog Exercises: Trackback Check-Up

It’s time to check your trackbacks. In Blog Exercises: Trackbacks and Blog Exercises: Backlinks you learned about trackbacks, the automatic process of a site linking to yours and generating a comment-like notification to alert you of the link to your article, and helping your readers discover what others are saying about your article. In this […]

Creating Footnotes in WordPress

Among the many techniques students and clients request in my WordPress and blogging workshops and classes1, requests for creating footnotes in WordPress are rare, but they do happen. There are very distinctive differences between traditional writing and web publishing styles.2 Footnotes have been replaced by links to cite a reference or resource to support the […]

Blog Exercises: Trackbacks

Trackbacks are like an invitation to a party. It is also like legitimate gossip. Trackbacks are notes telling you that someone is talking about you. Trackbacks are part of the important connections that form the true sense of the “web” on the Internet. WordPress and most modern publishing platforms generate trackbacks automatically. As common as […]

Blog Exercises: Weekly Link Roundups

Many bloggers publish weekly or monthly link roundups, highlights of some of the interesting sites they’ve found on the web. Most use a variety of automation techniques to generate this link list, bookmarking the web pages to a bookmarking program that helps them generate this list and release it once a week. It’s a lazy […]

Blog Exercises: Curing Uncategorized Fever

We’ve all seen it. I call it Uncategorized Fever. By default, any post not categorized in WordPress is assigned to the Uncategorized category. The Uncategorized category appears in your Categories and Tags list or clouds. In tag clouds, the larger the word, the more posts with that tag. If Uncategorized is clearly visible in these […]